Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

@hmw0029

I've never tried it with turkey, but I've tried injecting a chicken with melted butter in the past. I wasn't a big fan. It doesn't help keep the meat juicy - if you take the meat beyond 150 degrees, it dries out no matter what, so what you end up with is dry meat surrounded by butter. It still has that awful chalky texture in your mouth. It also just makes the bird taste like butter, instead of like a bird. It's kind of like grinding butter into your hamburgers. It adds some flavor and some fat, but in the end, it becomes a weaker expression of a burger.

For that reason, I'm actually even personally opposed to brining turkey in general - it ends up juicier, but you have more diluted turkey flavor. But to each their own - most people who have tried brined turkey swear by it.

@Burger365

You're right. Adding flavorings to your brine has a pretty minimal effect on the flavor of the meat. That's because the meat has a higher affinity for the sodium ions than it does for most common flavor compounds. When you put your meat in the brine, salt will selectively migrate into the meat, which basically means that there is less room for the other flavorings.

If you want to maximize marinating/brining, you should do two separate soaks. First, marinate your meat in a salt-free flavorful marinade. After that, brine it as usual. The flavor will come out much more distinctly.

Also, bear in mind that unless they are in solution, flavors won't enter the meat. So adding whole herbs to a marinade will have minimal effect unless you first bruise them, chop them, or otherwise rupture their cell structure so that they release flavor into the liquid.

@meat guy

yep - I should have pointed out that this information pertains only to short term (IE in the range of an hour to overnight) brining. As the test I did using a saturated salt solution shows, the effects that the salt has on the protein structure of the meat is much more important that the effects of osmosis, but you are right that if I had left that turkey breast in there for several days, it would have eventually lost enough moisture that it would affect the moisture level in the cooked product.

Thanks for the clarification re: denaturing vs. dissolving of myosin, and for the info about enhanced turkeys and sodium phosphate! No wonder butterballs are so moist. I actually find it really offputting (beyond the fact that those turkeys are raised in horrid conditions). The meat is almost spongelike because of the amount of moisture in it.

Interesting. I've never seen a bolognese recipe that doesn't contain some dairy element.

It also seems like a huge amount of tomatoes for a bolognese, which traditionally contain very little. This seems to me more like a recipe for a 3-day Italian-American Sunday Gravy without the sausage and braciole!

More than simple steaming, the final temperature the potatoes come to is also important. Too hot, and too many cells will burst and release starch, turning the potatoes gluey.

@jpacella

Thanks!

There's a link at the top and bottom of the stories that leads to a separate page with the full recipe for both the patty and the bun.

Let me know if it works out!

@pookay - yes, you're right. I jumped the gun in my response there. I stand corrected.

But at the risk of putting my foot in my mouth again, I'm going to ask you another question: my immediate reaction is that your statement that the rate of heating is inversely proportional to the distance is not quite accurate, because it does not take into account the heat transfer coefficient of the egg. In a vacuum, yes, the rate of heating is proportional to only the distance, but an egg has mass, and so there is a coefficient involved, and that coefficient is proportional to thickness of the egg that the heat has to pass through, so does that not turn the equation into an exponential one instead of a linear one?

And one more question: are we losing the other SEers here? :)

@LexieLo

Oops - right you are. I guess I sometimes mix up heads and tails. Either way, the concept is the same, and the mayo is delicious!

@semarr

Yeah... I looked at that recipe with a fair deal of skepticism. The science behind it is all wrong. For instance, the emulsifiers in egg yolks work much better at room temperature, when in that recipe, they specifically say chilled. They also recommend dumping all the fat into the egg yolks at once.

Without having actually made the recipe and followed it, my inclination is to say that there's no way that the baconnaise forms a true emulsion in that recipe. More likely, it is whipped, chilled bacon fat enhanced with egg yolks. It gets it's thickness from the crystallization of the saturated bacon fat, not from the oil in water emulsion that a true mayonnaise has. Not that that means it can't be delicious, only that it's *not* a mayonnaise in the true culinary or scientific sense of the word.

I did do experiments with bacon fat alone, and it has some of the same problems as the beef fat - difficult to form a stable emulsion. You don't have to dilute it quite as much as the beef fat, but you still need to dilute it some for it to work well.

On a side note:
When are restaurants gonna stop trying to be fancy by using the word aioli when they really mean mayonnaise? It really annoys me. An aioli is a very specific condiment that does not necessarily even have egg yolks in it. I've seen things called "aioli" on menus that don't even contain garlic in the, ferchrissake! It's my book, it's worse than calling any small hamburger a slider. Just man up, and call your sauce what it is: flavored mayonnaise!

Oops - dunno what happened to the first half of that comment. What I was saying was that the contents are under pressure: pressure is defined as the force per area applied perpendicularly to a surface. For air pressure, that force is proportional to the relative air density between two areas. In a sous-vide bag, the air density inside is much lower than the air density outside (because of the vacuum inside), and since it is in a compressible plastic pouch, this means that the outside air "presses" on the contents of the bag, and they end up compressed.

For example, put a cube of watermelon in a sous-vide bag, and when it comes out, is will have been pressed to less than half of its original volume.

@sanhedrin

wow - awesome! That gives me ideas for the holiday meal this year...

@cassandra

I'd think that hellman's probably had something to do with it. A good olive oil mayonnaise is excellent. One thing though. You can't make it in a blender or a food processor. The rough action incorporates too much air in to the mix which causes the olive oil to turn bitter and oxidize (try making to evoo mayos side-by-side, one by hand, the other in the food processor, and you'll see). The best way to make an evoo mayo is to make a regular mayo to begin with in the food processor, using a little bit of regular vegetable oil, say 1/2 a cup. Then transfer it to a regular bowl, and add the olive oil with a whisk. It'll prevent the oxidation problem. Or you can make the whole thing with a whisk.

If you're extra lazy, you can also just buy regular prepared mayo, then whisk in olive oil slowly. A regular jarred mayo can hold about it's own volume in extra oil without breaking!

@PaigeBW

Thanks - I've actually never seen that (seen the bacon salt, but not the may).

BUT!

I just took a look at their ingredients list, and either they've got an extremely well-stocked pantry, or their little anecdote about two dudes waking up every morning to experiment with making bacon-flavored mayo until they got it just right is a bold-faced lie. Looks like they've got every ingredient in there except... bacon!

soybean oil, water, egg yolk, gluconic acid, yeast extract, stabilizer (microcrystalline cellulose, modified food starch, xanthan gum, guar gum, gum arabic), cultured extrose, salt,, sugar, dehydrated garlic, paprika, dehydrated onion, spice, natural smoke flavor, natural flavors, tocopherols (vitamin E ), calcium disodium edta, autolyzed yeast extract.

I'll stick with the real deal. Thanks!

@jo wang

I've tried them with air in the past. It works, but it's harder to get the balloon out without breaking the chocolate, since you have to pop them to remove them. With water, they lost volume at a much slower rate, so more gentle on the chocolate.